Apple is finally owning up to a rather serious problem with its mobile operating system, iOS 7. IOS 7 has come under flak by a lot of users for its significantly overhauled and “flat” UI, however, it’s been the steady stream of bugs in the operating system that have really riled up users.

One of the most nagging bugs causes the phone to freeze, then “respring” back to the lock screen. While many have characterized this behavior as a reboot, it’s actually just restarting the iOS Springboard that manages the iOS home screen. A full system reboot takes a bit longer than a respring.

The home screen/respring issue first showed up in beta releases of iOS 7 way back in June

But however you characterize the bug, it still has been causing havoc for many iOS users. Any unsaved data that you are currently working on when the bug occurs is lost, and this is happening multiple times per day to some unlucky iOS users.

But according to Mashable, Apple is finally on the case — even though the bug has been around [officially] since iOS 7 was released in September 2013. In typical Apple fashion, the company gave minimal details, only stating, “We have a fix in an upcoming software update for a bug that can occasionally cause a home screen crash.”

But while Apple has acknowledged its respring bug, it is still being tightlipped about the even more widely reported problems with Safari on 64-bit iOS 7 devices: namely the iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and Retina iPad Mini (although the latter two seem to be affected most by these issue). Slews of users have reported that Safari simply crashes back to the home screen for no reason multiple times per day. IOS flags the crashes as being related to “low memory.”

Safari Low Memory errors in iOS 7 on an iPad Air

Anand Shimpi of AnandTech briefly touched on the memory issues in his iPad Air review:

In general you’re looking at a 20 - 30% increase in memory footprint when dealing with an all 64-bit environment. At worst, the device’s total memory usage never exceeded 60% of what ships with the platform but these are admittedly fairly light use cases. With more apps open, including some doing work in the background, I do see relatively aggressive eviction of apps from memory. The most visible case is when Safari tabs have to be reloaded upon switching to them. Applications being evicted from memory don’t tend to be a huge problem since the A7 can reload them quickly.

The tricky part is you don’t really need all that much more memory. Unfortunately as with any dual-channel memory architecture, you’re fairly limited in how you can increase memory capacity and still get peak performance. Apple’s only move here would be to go to 2GB, which understandably comes with both power and financial costs. The former is a bigger concern for the iPhone 5s, but on the iPad Air I would’ve expected a transition sooner rather than later.

Similarly, many users report that Safari tabs will refresh often when switching from tab to tab, even when Safari is the only app open.